Revival Season - Monica West (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📗

were traces of sadness in her voice, but the dark lenses that covered half her face were turned toward a skywriter swooping in the distance, creating indecipherable letters that faded a few seconds later.

“The last time I went to a pool like this, my sisters and I were in high school. During the summer when my mom worked, we stayed at home alone and went to the pool. Claudia’s boyfriend was a lifeguard there. We’d pack snacks and stay all day, just to avoid being at home.”

“What do you miss the most about them?”

Ma was so rarely open with me like this—especially not when Papa was around—so I wanted to take advantage of her candor.

“So many things.” She rubbed the indentations that her sunglasses had etched into the bridge of her nose. “Like the way Claudia’s eyes crinkled at the corners whenever she told a lie. Or how Yolanda used to feed me her famous chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven on my birthday, whenever we could afford the ingredients, that is.” Her voice caught on the last word. She always spoke about them in the past tense, even though they still lived in Ma’s hometown, which was only two hours north of where we lived now. Papa told us that we couldn’t have a relationship with them because they weren’t saved—effectively, they were dead to us. I’d never questioned Papa’s reasons for not letting us around the only aunts we had, even though I knew it was our job to convert nonbelievers.

In public, Ma supported his rules, but on a few occasions, usually when Papa was at the church for a trustee meeting, she slipped into the pantry and shut the door behind her. The muffled sounds of a one-sided conversation echoed through the kitchen—calls that abruptly ended when Papa’s car rumbled in the driveway. One day a few weeks before this revival season began, I ran upstairs and got on the other receiver. I didn’t remember everything they said, but at one point, Aunt Claudia asked Ma when she would wake up and take her life back. Ma hung up on her instead of answering.

Aunt Claudia’s question had haunted me before we left, but I kept the memory submerged. Occasionally, it bobbed to the surface and made many other parts of Ma and Papa’s marriage come into focus—how Papa whisked her away from her family at the end of that weeklong revival and asked her to finish the rest of the revival circuit by his side. How he married her six weeks later and told her she couldn’t see her family anymore. Or the fact that the only photo I’d seen of their wedding day was of just the two of them in front of a minister, no family or friends standing nearby.

They don’t know him like we do. It was what I told myself after the dial tone droned in my ear. But Aunt Claudia’s words rose again last night and lingered at the periphery of my mind.

“Tell me the story of how you and Papa met.” I had heard the story a few times, but I wanted to hear her tell it again. Maybe I even wanted her loving words about him to rub off on me, to remind me that he had been good once.

Her voice fell away to a whisper as she talked about her pre-Papa life, about how she met Papa the same night that she promised to run away with Claudia and Yolanda if their father came home drunk again, leaving purple handprints on their pajamaed bodies like souvenirs. The evening that she’d met Papa had been a worse night than most, and they packed backpacks and stole their father’s truck, vowing never to come back. They drove without a place to go—kind of like what we were doing now—and saw a tent that they thought belonged to a circus.

“I was seventeen when we stumbled on the revival. I didn’t even know what a revival was back then, can you imagine that?” She folded her arms over her chest and laughed. “Yolanda, Claudia, and I got there after it started and sat in the back row. I didn’t know what I was looking for when I came inside. An escape, maybe. But when I first heard the music, I felt like I’d been transported to another place. I had never experienced anything like that before.”

I knew what she meant; I had grown up in the church, yet there were still moments when my soul rode the highest chords to unimagined places. I imagined hearing that mixture of keyboard and tambourine and drums alongside a choir for the first time—it probably felt like her soul had been snatched out.

“And then he started speaking. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was barely older than me, but his presence filled the room like he was twice my age. I didn’t know the God that he was talking about, but I wanted to know everything. By the end of his sermon, I jumped out of my chair and ran to the front of the tent before it was time, before the benediction. The deacons held me back, but I fell onto the altar and gave my life to Jesus in that moment. And I met my husband.”

I turned and looked over at her. Her eyes were still hidden behind her glasses, but there was no smile carved in her cheeks.

“What happened next?”

“He asked me to stay after the service, and when the entire tent emptied, he invited me to revival the next night. I couldn’t tell if I was doing it for Jesus or to get your father’s attention, but I went back to revival every night that week—making up excuses when my sisters asked where I was going. He was supposed to go to another revival in some new city that Sunday, but he showed up at the diner where I worked on his way out of town. I still had three